Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 1

It's been a while since I last posted a detailed diary of my Galactic Seasons exploits - in fact, the last time I did so was almost exactly two years ago in Season 2. I basically stopped writing these posts because I found that the changes to the system after Season 1 made it so much easier to get both the daily and weekly objectives done that I didn't really think it was worth going into detail about how exactly I completed them each day/week.

This was quite a contrast to Season 1, when my blog basically turned into nothing but my Galactic Seasons diary for three months. This was because the first Galactic Season used a very different model that relied a lot on randomised daily objectives and was a lot more demanding of your time. It fills me with a certain degree of amusement now to look back at the time I fretted about whether I could get two rounds of dailies done before having to shoot off to an emergency dental appointment. I mean, that toothache sucked ass, but the circumstances seem funny in hindsight.

Anyway, the reason I decided to give this diary thing another shot this season was that, now that I'm effectively doing seasons on five six servers, it's actually somewhat demanding again, and it's only going to be more so this season with the nerf to the reputation Conquest objective for easy points! I thought it would be interesting to document my journey as it happened once again, and maybe approaching the whole endeavour with more awareness might also help me with not going too crazy pushing myself through too many objectives every week.

I think for clarity it would be good to start by listing all the available weekly objectives for week one as well as my thoughts on them, as my descriptions of my daily play sessions might seem incredibly random otherwise.

• Earn 200k Conquest points: This is one that kind of takes care of itself while you work on other objectives, so pretty much a freebie on all servers.
• Earn the seasonal currency: Same for this one.
• Kill 100 mobs with a tank companion: An easy filler that can be done in a variety of content and stacks well with other objectives; I figured I'd do this one on several servers.
• Kill four named champion mobs on Quesh (2 Republic, 2 Imperial): Not one of my favourites since you have to do a lot of driving around for not much action and minimal Conquest points, plus if you're unlucky there can be quite a bit of wait time for respawns, but it's an objective that's easy enough to do as long as you have a high enough character on both sides of the faction divide.
• Complete 15 missions as a Jedi consular or Sith inquisitor: Wanting to be able to complete these origin story-based objectives is why I have at least four alts on every server now, and it's almost guaranteed to be one of my picks on each of the secondary servers.
• Complete 8 repeatable or side missions and kill 100 mobs on the Outer Rim planets Tatooine, Hoth, Belsavis or Rishi: Another one I choose often as it can be completed easily and in so many different ways, which counters repetition while playing across multiple servers.
• Complete 2 out of 4 selected flashpoints (Mandalorian Raiders, Cademimu, Directive 7, Spirit of Vengeance): I like flashpoints but this objective can be kind of time-consuming compared to others. I'll always pick it on Darth Malgus as an opportunity to play with Mr Commando, but I'll want to limit myself to only doing it on one or two of the other servers.
  
• Kill the Quesh and Nar Shaddaa world bosses: Very easy and rewarding if a group can be found within a reasonable amount of time. Camping them by myself while waiting for a raid to come by gets boring however.
  
• Play 3-6 GSF matches (wins count double): Like the flashpoints, this one's a bit time-consuming, so probably something I'd choose to do on a few servers but not on all of them.
• KotFE chapter 14 on veteran mode or higher: The only objective of the week that I knew I definitely wasn't going to bother with anywhere as I don't enjoy replaying chapters on characters that have already done them.
  
• Kill the Kessan's Landing world boss: Another quick and easy one if a group is available but that "if" does matter.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

Patch day was an office day for me, which meant that I didn't come home until late, and as soon I had the game patched up it was time to jump into a scheduled operation with my guild. After that I didn't have a lot of time or energy left to work on seasons objectives. I just did a bit of puttering around on alts to earn enough Conquest points to complete the daily seasons objective, such as raising a companion's influence level here and doing a bit of crafting there.

I thought it was interesting that the preview of the first four weeks of seasons objectives didn't include a single one that could be completed in PvP (not counting GSF), which means no overlap between the two seasons for at least a month. In order not to neglect my PvP ambitions right away, I did three warzones on my level 80 dps Juggernaut and won all three. I wish I could just be happy about good luck like that, but since it's so random whether I end up on the winning side or not I always just feel like I'll "pay" for the lucky streak later (by having an equal or worse losing streak).

Since it was late, I wanted to limit my efforts on the other servers to quickly grabbing the daily seasons objective. On Leviathan I did some quests on Korriban on the lowbie Sith inquisitor I created last season, which got me there quite quickly, but I also knew that I didn't actually feel like questing this much on every server that late at night. In the past I would've just popped a reputation token everywhere else to get it over with, but of course that was no longer an option. Through a bit of trial and error I found out that I could still get to the required 25k points on Tulak Hord, Satele Shan and Star Forge with (relatively) minimal effort by using a reputation item, raising a companion's influence, levelling up a crew skill, doing five crew skill missions (they can be low level to make it quick) and placing five stronghold decorations - give or take one or two of the smaller objectives depending on my stronghold bonus on each server and on whether the character is in a guild with any additional bonuses.

On Shae Vizla, I put myself in the queue for warzones and GSF just to see whether the transfers had already made a difference (even though it wasn't prime time for the Aussies) but I had only been in the queue for a few minutes when I saw someone looking for dps for the two weekly world boss objectives. This was too convenient to pass up, so I ended up completing three weekly objectives in quick succession (the two world boss ones plus the one to find blueprint fragments). Ironically, this meant that I unlocked the Copero stronghold on Shae before I did so on Darth Malgus, though it was 1 a.m. for me at that point and I was too tired to even look at it; I just wanted to go to bed.

Day 2 - Wednesday

I tried queueing for warzones and GSF on Shae Vizla again for a bit before the daily reset (which happens at noon in my time zone) since that's closer to APAC prime time and I actually got into a level 80 warzone... though that just ended up being a reminder of why doing PvP with a higher ping can be frustrating, as I jumped out of the starting zone into the pit in Huttball, and then watched - while down there - as an Operative holotraversed up to where I had stood before and scored.

I continued queueing past the reset and got into another warzone and two GSF matches. I won both of the latter, which completed my first GSF weekly mission since Galactic Season 5 and also got me two thirds of the way to the GSF weekly seasons objective. The matches themselves were a bit weird though. In the first one I was top damage, which never happens, and in the second one we had more than twenty self-destructs before either team even had time to capture the first satellite. I actually asked in chat what was going on and someone responded that they were "cycling through ships for Conquest points". (I later saw this behaviour to a lesser degree even in a death match. Just... ow.) Sooo... when the devs inevitably nerf that Conquest objective or change it to require more interaction to get credit for flying a given ship, you'll know whose behaviour is to blame.

In the evening I started my game time by doing some PvP on Darth Malgus. It may surprise some, but in a way I'm actually the least focused on seasons on my home server, because I spend so much time there that objectives will basically get done one way or another. It's the other servers where I really have to work on it to achieve the desired progress. Either way, doing this also completed the 200k Conquest points weekly so that I could finally unlock the new stronghold on Darth Malgus.

After also completing one GSF weekly mission, I decided that it was time to do the rounds on the other servers again. I played two GSF matches on Tulak Hord that were horrible losses and decided that was enough GSF for me for the day. I saw someone talking about world bosses in general chat so asked whether there was a group going and got a whisper in reply that there wasn't one "but why don't we make one?" Turns out that "us" making one meant that the other person sent me a group invite, made me leader and then just sat there expecting me to do the work of getting more people. I tried to LFM a few times but got literally zero responses so just excused myself after a few minutes.

On Leviathan I continued my baby inquisitor's journey across Korriban, and on Satele Shan I did some side questing on Belsavis, since my level 80 consular was already there for his class story anyway. On Star Forge I kept things quick by just doing two dailies on Rishi (which also gave reputation!) using my boosted inquisitor, and then doing a few more clicky things to make up the difference for the daily objective. (This would generally become my MO throughout the week if I didn't quite hit the required number of daily Conquest points with my initial choice of activity, and I didn't always mention it anymore.)

Day 3 - Thursday

Another day at the office meant limited play time once again. Once home, I decided to log into Tulak Hord first this time and arrived just in time for the formation of a world boss group. However, they didn't want to do FR3-D0M for some reason, so I hopped over to Ord Mantell by myself just to check whether anyone was doing the boss there at all. One (1) guy from the previous world boss group showed up too and decided to pull. I'd heard that FR3-D0M was technically soloable, but technically and practically are two very different things, so I was unsure how we would do with just the two of us, but we killed the boss just fine.

I logged into Leviathan to keep an eye on fleet chat there while eating dinner in case I could catch another world boss group. However, there wasn't much going on there, so I eventually relocated to Quesh to see whether I could leech off any passing guild groups that were there to kill the world boss, but had no luck on that front either. I just learned that like Gargath, the Rogue Cartel Warbot doesn't move until you get too close to him. His personal cut-off between caring and not caring about your presence is at 70m.

I decided to leave Leviathan for now and played a GSF match and two warzones on Darth Malgus before returning to doing the rounds on the rest of the other servers. On Star Forge I did another two Rishi dailies, and on Satele Shan my consular did some more side-questing on Belsavis. Back on Leviathan, I decided to return to my little inquisitor, who only killed like five mobs on Korriban before triggering the "gain five levels" Conquest objective - I was happy to take the easy win for the day and moved on to Shae Vizla for the evening.

I unlocked the stronghold there and put my warrior in the queue for GSF, warzones and flashpoints, but got impatient when nothing popped within ten minutes, so I ended up swapping to my consular to do some side-questing on Tatooine instead.

Day 4 - Friday

Since there was a login reward of eight seasons points for four consecutive days of logins this week, this meant that after the daily reset on Friday I was able to unlock the Copero stronghold on all servers that day, even where I hadn't completed many objectives yet.

I tried queueing for some activities on Shae Vizla around lunch time again (mostly keeping the game in the background while doing something else) but only got one warzone pop in over an hour of waiting. After the daily reset I saw someone put together a group for the Dromund Kaas world boss, which I decided to join for easy daily objective completion (plus I had the weekly world boss quest on 3/4). Just as I was thinking about logging off again, I got a GSF pop though, which allowed me to complete the GSF seasons objective and another weekly mission.

In the evening I did some PvP and a couple more GSF matches on Darth Malgus before it was time for ops with my guild team again. Afterwards I did some more PvP before finally switching to Star Forge. There was a world boss group forming in general chat there, so I jumped right in and was able to tick those two weekly objectives off on this server too. I then just hopped over onto my inquisitor to do two more dailies on Rishi.

After that I returned to the Leviathan and finished off the last few quests on Korriban to get credit for my 15 missions done as an inquisitor, before switching to my level 80 knight and killing the two named Imperial champion mobs on Quesh.

It wasn't that late for a Friday, but I was tired so decided to leave the dailies on Satele Shan and Tulak Hord for the next morning.

Day 5 - Saturday

Ah, the weekend! I logged into Satele Shan in the morning and first checked general chat on the fleet to see whether there were any world boss groups going on, but there was just some paragraphs-long discussion about philosophy and science, so I continued my consular's questing on Belsavis once more. Within a matter of minutes, I ticked off four weekly objectives in a row: Outer Rim missions, questing as a consular, playing with a companion set to tank, and finding currency. I love it when things line up like that, and this also sorted my Conquest for the day with ease.

After that I hopped over to Tulak Hord and did a GSF match there, which completed my trooper's GSF weekly mission and the daily seasons objective. Having achieved my goals much quicker than expected, I logged into Shae Vizla to queue for some PvP and was happy to complete a warzone weekly mission there for the first time since PvP Season 4 ended.

Later in the afternoon, after the daily reset had happened, I logged into my knight on Leviathan and started doing some exploration missions on Tatooine while also putting myself into the queue for all four flashpoints eligible for the seasons objective. I got a pop for veteran mode Cademimu after a while, which pushed me over the number of Conquest points needed for the daily objective.

Next I went to Tulak Hord and put myself in the GSF queue on my trooper while getting started on the Tatooine bonus series. I got a pop about halfway through it and won the match, which completed that seasons objective and my Conquest for the day, however due to the bonus series being known to bug out if you pause halfway through, I pushed on to complete it the same afternoon anyway. This completed the Outer Rim missions and questing with a tank companion objectives, making Tulak Hord the first server on which I was on 7/7 weeklies completed for the week.

Checking in on Star Forge, I did two more Rishi dailies on my inquisitor and completed her weekly Conquest target, but I noted that this hadn't really advanced me all that much throughout the Outer Rim objective since while I had done eight missions, they'd been so easy that I'd only killed fewer than thirty mobs. Since I don't like just grinding mobs without a purpose, I made a note to myself to tackle the requirements for the remaining, only partially completed objectives on other characters over the next two days.

On Satele Shan, I consulted my missions spreadsheet and realised that my consular had never done the Directive 7 story, so I decided to do that flashpoint on story mode for a triple whammy of story, seasons and progression of the first quest you get in the Copero villa (more on that another time).

In the evening it was time for my guild's social night on Darth Malgus, which helped me tick off the two world boss objectives there before we launched ourselves into an operation. Afterwards Mr Commando and I conscripted two damage dealers to run D7 and Spirit of Vengeance on master mode for another seasons objective. After that I was properly conked out and went off to enjoy an early night.

Day 6 - Sunday

I started my Sunday morning by logging into Shae Vizla and continuing my side-questing on my consular on Tatooine. She was effectively working on three objectives at once that way, but I only needed two more for the week. The Outer Rim and companion tank ones completed way before I would have hit 15 missions as a consular, which made Shae Vizla the second server on which I completed 7/7 objectives for the week.

As this meant that I was caught up with daily objectives for the current reset, I decided to return to Star Forge and do some work on the consular missions objective on my newest baby alt there. Being only level 2, she wasn't going to contribute to Conquest anyway. Breezing through the early Tython quests, she hit the 15 missions completed (keeping in mind my boosted inquisitor had already done 8 missions on Rishi as well) by level 7.

I returned to the game in the late afternoon/early evening. Starting on Leviathan, I logged into my level 34 bounty hunter and travelled to Quesh to kill the two named Republic champions there. At 34, he was a bit low for the planet, but my experiences on Taris last season taught me that this wasn't really a problem. I did however arrive just in time to see someone quick travel away from the first champion's corpse, so that I had to wait for him to respawn. On my way to the second one, I saw a level 80 zoom past me as I got dismounted by a group of weak mobs and quietly went "nooo" in my head as I figured that he'd also kill the second champion just before I could get there, but I managed to catch up in time to get a few hits for credit in. After that I continued to putter around a bit longer for Conquest purposes, which pushed me over the 200k weekly objective.

On Tulak Hord, there wasn't much to do since I was done with the weekly objectives, but since I had invaded small yield with the two-person guild again, I had incentive to still fill that bar up as well. Fortunately I had a half-finished GSF weekly mission in my log, so one GSF win later I was done with my daily Conquest and the guild's Conquest target was most of the way there as well.

On Darth Malgus, I played two warzone matches to complete another character's warzone weekly and knocked out all four champion mobs on Quesh to get myself to 7/7 seasons objectives on my home server at last.

I continued on to Star Forge, where after some contemplation in regards to what I could do to complete my remaining weekly objectives while minimising boring repetition, I decided to do the Hoth bonus series on my trooper. It had been so many years since I'd last done it, I literally couldn't remember a thing about it at first, though some bits started to sound familiar once I got going. When I got to the mission about the Onderonian beast-lord I literally shouted "oh snap" out loud, much to the consternation of Mr Commando, since I had never realised that the blackmail you can use on Akoru as an Imperial during Onslaught isn't just made up, but based on this actual quest chain. Ahh, this game is still so good, you guys! Anyway, that finished my companion questing and Outer Rim missions objectives, leaving me with just a smidge more Conquest points to gain for both my personal target and the 200k Conquest points objective, but I decided to leave that for Monday.

On Satele Shan, I decided that after playing nothing but my consular there all week, I should give some love to my level 62 knight instead, so I had her kill the Imperial Quesh champions and put her in the queue for vet mode Cademimu and Mandalorian Raiders. She quickly got into a run for the former, which was fast and smooth. I then sent my level 38 agent to kill the Republic targets on Quesh, and with that Satele Shan was on 7/7 weeklies completed too.

Shae Vizla was already done as per my earlier paragraph about questing in the morning, and I had the Taskmaster Conquest objective for sub-80 characters sitting at a partial completion of 9/10, so I basically just had to make my Jedi do a companion mission for Qyzen to tick it over and that was that done for the day as well.

Day 7 - Monday

With four out of six servers sitting on 7/7 and the other two being as good as done too, there fortunately wasn't too much left to do. On Darth Malgus, Star Forge and Tulak Hord I completed my daily objective with some clickies and a bit of puttering around. On Star Forge this also completed the 200k Conquest points weekly objective for me, and on Tulak Hord it achieved my guild's small yield Conquest target.

Leviathan was where I had the most work left to do, as I needed one more flashpoint plus a bit more questing on Tatooine to wrap up my last three weekly objectives, plus my bounty hunter had (unintentionally) gotten really close to reaching his personal Conquest target the previous day, so I wanted to make that tick over as well. The latter was easily achieved by having him do a bit of story questing on Balmorra. After that, I got back on my knight and queued for all seasonal flashpoints on both difficulties again, which got me into veteran mode Mandalorian Raiders this time. It was another uneventful run, except that someone asked to "focus boss" on the last encounter, which is not usually a good idea... as it turns out, you can indeed burn him down before the turrets kill you nowadays, but I still didn't see the benefit as the turrets don't despawn and you can't exit in combat, so you need to run around and still kill them all afterwards anyway. A few more Tatooine exploration missions later, another personal Conquest target was achieved, as well as 7/7 season weeklies.

This just left the daily objective on Satele Shan and Shae Vizla, and I took care of that on both servers by completing Conquest on an alt each.

Week 1 Thoughts

Well, that whole "not going too crazy with the playing on multiple servers" thing didn't quite work out, did it? Seeing how I pushed myself to completing 7/7 weeklies on all six of them once again. In fairness, this week had a lot of very easy objectives, several of which could be completed in multiple ways, so it was honestly just pretty fun. I do think that based on the information we've been given, I'll want to take it easier in week two since the objectives on offer will be different.

The Hunt for the Best View Returns... Again!

Last year, I mentioned that the "Best View in SWTOR" contest, first held in 2021 for the game's tenth anniversary, made an unexpected return. I was even more surprised when I saw the announcement yesterday that it was coming back for a third round this year. If the SWTOR team wants to make a habit out of this, they'll have to give us a lot of new planets this year or else start repeating some of them on the featured planet list next year.

Anyway, I immediately felt inspired and spent some time traipsing around the galaxy and taking screenshots - none of which I'm going to show here yet of course. Instead, I'll share my submissions from last year. Back in 2021, I only submitted shots for three out of ten possible planets, but last year I actually entered nine out of ten possible screenshots, with Odessen being the one planet I left out since I just couldn't find an angle I was happy with there. Anyway, these were my submissions - you can compare them to the actual winners here.

Coruscant will always have a special place in my heart, and the quintessential experience of the Republic home world is stepping out of the spaceport into that perpetual dusk while the music swells and sky cars roar past overhead. There was no question that this was going to be the focus of my screenshot, and it was for the winner as well, but they basically faced the other way. It's a worthy shot, but I'll admit I still prefer my own submission in this case.

The winning shot of Quesh shows grass, water, trees and part of a Hutt Palace, and it's interesting to me that I took some similarly-themed shots during my own exploration of Quesh, but ultimately I opted for submitting the refineries blowing smoke into the sky, since to me, the toxic air is what defines Quesh more than anything else.

I had a hunch that this one wasn't going to be winning shot material, since I noticed that while NPCs are technically allowed to be featured in your submission, no winner has ever included one in the foreground. However, to me it was perfect since swamp and rakghouls are what defines Taris above all else. The winning shot was of the wreck of the Endar Spire instead (I think?) which is of course a KOTOR reference but never meant much to me personally.

There's something to be said for the stark beauty of driven snow, but while taking shots of Hoth I struggled with how empty it always looked, which is why I opted to include these tauntauns in my submission. Same problem as with the rakghoul I guess... though I also notice now that perhaps I've been using the full width of the screen too much, seeing how the winning submissions get cropped down to 4:3 for the in-game decorations. Half of that tauntaun wouldn't even be in the shot then.

Alderaan is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful planets in the game, but I find that this beauty can be a bit challenging to capture accurately in screenshots, so I was quite pleased with myself for managing to take this wide shot of the Glarus Valley. The winning shot ended up being one of Castle Panteer however, which I guess was kind of the more obvious choice. I had taken pictures of it myself as well, but opted against submitting them.

Dromund Kaas is an interesting mix of rain-swept jungles contrasted against the stark, futuristic spires of Kaas City, and I simply decided to submit this rather old screenshot I took of the city since I really liked it. The winner shows both the jungle and parts of the city in the background, which I really can't fault.

With Manaan there was the question of whether to screenshot the new invasion zone or the serenity of the old entrance area. For me it was an obvious choice since I really don't like the visuals of the invasion zone all that much. This particular shot was actually taken inside the Depths of Manaan flashpoint. The contest winner was from the new area though.

Iokath was a challenging place to frame, since it's incredibly cluttered visually, in a way that I honestly find kind of ugly. I eventually found this view at the edge of the expanse, which looked much cleaner and more serene, with just the Eternal Fleet ships taking to the sky in the background. I will admit that this isn't very "typically" Iokath though. The winner managed to take a much better shot of just outside the Republic (?) base that manages to be visually busy but still look good.

Rishi was a tough one because I couldn't decide whether the Rishi Maze or Raider's Cove were more iconic for the planet. I eventually opted for the former, with a grophet in the foreground because I love grophets, OK? I was quite surprised that the chosen winner actually included neither.

Anyway, I'm off to take more pictures of this year's featured planets! If you want to take part, you can find all the details here, and you have until the 29th of September to make your submission(s).

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 8

Day 1:

Got GSF and flashpoints as my weeklies and re-rolled flashpoints into ops. My dailies were generic killing in Hutt Space, and killing 75 insectoids on Voss. I re-rolled the latter, naturally, but it just transformed into insectoids on Ossus instead. I mean: yes, that's better, but still not great. At least the two dailies went well together. I went to Ossus on my Guardian and picked up five daily missions in bug-infested areas, did those, and then ran around killing some extra Geonosians since the quests only got the counter to about halfway. Both objectives completed at the same time.

Day 2:

I did a bit of a double take when I saw that my dailies were generic mob killing in Hutt Space and to do three GSI dailies on Makeb. Looking back at my Seasons diary, I've only had the latter objective once before, back in week three, which was also focused on Hutt Space. I don't know why they don't have these as options during other weeks; after all, GSI dailies exist on a number of planets. Or maybe the objectives also exist and I've just not seen them outside this one week? I assume they only have a chance to show up if your first daily login is on a character that actually has a seeker droid and macrobinculars, hmm...

Anyway, I quite appreciated this change of pace and took my Vanguard tank to Makeb to do some GSI dailies there, expecting the associated mob killing to come naturally. I tried to pick the "opposing set" to the missions I took last time to keep things varied. It was a chill enough time, though I have to say the macrobinocular quests pretty much always work out to be the better deal. The seeker droid ones always sound really appealing on paper, technically requiring zero combat and all, but then the things to dig up are so hard to find that you have to do three rounds of the map and things end up taking forever anyway.

Day 3:

Insectoids on Ossus and Voss for both my dailies, are you freaking kidding me? Naturally I re-rolled the Voss one and got GSF instead. In the match I played, a guildie of mine on the enemy team killed me over and over and we lost. I feel like I'm just losing these all the time, but I don't know if that's just in my head. I'll have to do a tally at the end of the Season to figure out the actual numbers.

For Ossus I did another round of five dailies on my Guardian. Since I knew from day one that I'd have to kill extras, I tried to do so, but probably because it was earlier in the evening it was actually quite busy, I struggled to find any mobs at all in places. So I then did another round of five dailies on my Sage, and both together did get me my mob tally quite comfortably.

Day 4:

Generic mob killing and Voss insectoids again. I re-rolled the latter and it turned into Ossus insectoids instead, so it was off to Ossus for another combo deal of doing five dailies each on two characters. For the second round I chose an Imp this time. It's a good thing I love Ossus as much as I do or I probably would've got a bit annoyed by all this repetition.

Day 5:

For the third day in a row, the game tried to send me to Voss to kill insectoids, and for the third day in a row I re-rolled it, this time into Ossus dailies. This was nice as I could just do the second half of the weekly on my Marauder without worrying about mob kills.

My other daily was Galactic Starfighter, which ended up being a domination match that was a decisive win for my team. Looking at the scoreboard at the end, it appeared to have been really unbalanced in our favour, with a lot of proper aces on my side.

Day 6:

This time my dailies were GSF and Ossus insectoids. The latter made me think hard since I didn't really want to go to Ossus for the fourth day in a row, but re-rolling could potentially result in Voss insectoids instead... in the end I decided to risk it and fortunately the die landed on "play a warzone" instead.

The GSF match was another disastrous loss during which I suffered my first death before my team had scored even a single point, but it was still decent fun. I played the regular PvP match on my Shadow in the levelling bracket and got into an Ancient Hypergates, which ended up being a very close loss. It was a good game though - we seemed to be hopelessly outmatched in the actual fights but me and another Shadow did the brunt of the point scoring for our team - sadly it just wasn't quite enough.

Day 7:

My last two dailies for the week were GSF and the killing of generic mobs in Hutt Space, both of which I was fine with. The GSF match also completed the associated weekly - just in time. It was another match where I got shot down by a guildie and we lost horribly. More annoyingly though, I had really bad lag again. There was one point where I hit the speed boost on my way to a satellite, then let go because I wanted to stop, but the ship just kept going on and on and on, shooting right past the satellite and into space because I couldn't make it stop. I just about managed to turn around but got killed right afterwards anyway (unsurprisingly).

This was also the day when I got my second weekly done, by running Scum and Villainy story mode with my guild. I don't think I've ever left both weekly objectives until so late in the week. Finally I completed the mob killing daily by doing a couple of quests on Quesh on my evil Juggernaut.

Week 8 thoughts:

I don't think I've explicitly said it before, but I don't actually care that much about any of the rewards from Seasons, I just enjoy filling the bars. I won't say no to another free companion, but truth be told I have more than enough of them already. Likewise, all the old rewards now available on the vendor are irrelevant to me since I was already playing when they were given out the first time. About the most interesting thing I thought were the two new fleet apartments - while I have more empty strongholds than decorated ones, they at least have some novelty value.

I realised this week that I had earned my eighth token, meaning that I had enough to buy one of the two strongholds. (The way it's designed you can only buy one per Season.) I meant to buy the Republic one but was tired when I talked to the vendor and so ended up buying the Imperial one by accident instead. D'oh! Oh well, I guess I was planning to eventually get them both anyway. Now it's just the Republic one that will have to wait until the next Season.

Day 10: Death #IntPiPoMo

It's the last day of November, the last day of International Picture Posting Month, and the last day of my 10 days of SWTOR screenshots. As usual, I close the series on the theme of death, even though we're officially not really dying in game, only getting defeated every so often.

SWTOR does not have good relationship with the third dimension when it comes to death. This is very apparent from the way the whole instance can bug out on you on Soa if you die anywhere except on the bottom floor, but it also shows itself in other places where you can die while being in the air.

On Dread Master Raptus in Dread Fortress for example, you can get thrown high into the air if you have aggro, and if you die from that you usually can't be revived because your body will appear to be somewhere completely different on your screen than where it shows for everyone else, and the latter location is usually somewhere unreachable to boot. In the above screenshot you can see me looking down at a guildie whose corpse is floating in mid-air standing up, all while she was probably assuring us that her body was right there by the door.

This shows me (and a bunch of others) having died to the Rogue Cartel Warbot on Quesh during a world boss run. This isn't anything special per se, but it amused me that this is exactly the same way I suffered my first ever death to a raid boss back in 2012. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I've mentioned before that as an endgame player, basically most of your deaths occur during operations or PvP. I kind of used to appreciate how lying dead on the floor during a boss fight would sometimes actually give you a particularly good angle for a screenshot, but more recently I've become kind of blasé about that. Too much focus on progression I guess, with not enough thought put into simply admiring the sights. Here's one of the rare occasions when I remembered my roots however and took a moment to admire the machine core in Temple of Sacrifice while waiting for my guildies to finish wiping. (Though we did get Revan down in the end! Not on this try though.)

Your regularly scheduled posting will resume next week - I expect that there will still be a lot to talk about in December though, what with my usual year in review thoughts and the upcoming release of 5.10.

IntPiPoMo count: 60

Questing Surprises

After I finished my knight's class story, I was wondering what levelling goal to tackle next. Eventually I decided to go back to working on my Commando on the Ebon Hawk. She's been max level for a while now, but more than merely levelling her up, I had made it my mission a while ago to replay all the quests on Republic side on her, since it's so easy to skip them these days and it's been quite a while since I actually saw all of them. When I last left her, she had just finished the Balmorran bonus series.

Aside from the vastly accelerated XP gains, the levelling game also underwent a lot of more subtle changes in 4.0. I did write a first impressions piece about that shortly after 4.0's launch, but my focus back then was on a couple of Imperial alts. On Republic side, I continue to be surprised by changes that I haven't seen yet, such as when I mentioned a broken cut scene in a mission on Coruscant in this post.

One thing I already noticed back in February but about which I didn't write a full blog post at the time was the removal of what I considered an important story choice in the planetary storyline on Balmorra. At one point, after taking control of the planetary satellites, you have to choose between using them to help the Republic military (which was your original goal) or to save a bunch of slicers from being executed - with the latter option having the additional complication that said slicers are best buds with the guy who helped you gain control of the satellites in the first place. Except... when I played through this on my Commando, no dialogue wheel came up, and she just made the light side choice by default. Wait, what? I mean, I was playing light side anyway so I guess it wasn't a big deal, but it was still kind of jarring and I can only imagine how awkward it must feel if you were gunning for the other option.

As not many knowledgeable old-timers replay this content at any given point, the issue hasn't received much publicity, though I found at least one angry forum thread about it. Myself, I simply submitted a bug report about it, because I couldn't fathom why a choice like that would have been removed intentionally. Shortening bonus missions is one thing, but this? Just makes no sense.

As I finally continued to Quesh the other night, I was in for a positive surprise however. For as long as I can remember, there has been this mission on Quesh which is part of the main planetary chain and has you raiding a factory. During the mission dialogue, Broga the Hutt tells you about how he'd really like you to pick up some adrenals while you're over there (wink wink, nudge nudge), which seemed like pretty common "bonus mission talk". The problem was that there never was a bonus mission. Nothing appeared on the quest tracker, and I never found anything to click on inside the factory either. It was a mystery.

Now, as far as I can reconstruct things in hindsight, the bonus mission appears to have always been in the game files, but I guess some bug was preventing it from triggering properly. On the official forums, I found complaints from as recently as 2015 decrying the fact that the quest wasn't working. Well, imagine my surprise when I picked up the main mission this time around, and suddenly the bonus "Broga's Adrenals" appeared on my quest tracker. And lo and behold... when I arrived in the factory, there were crates on the floor that I could click on to pick up the long-lost adrenals! The best part was that on handing in, I was also given the choice whether I wanted to actually hand the adrenals over to Broga or claim them for the Republic. I was a bit surprised that the latter was considered the light side option - even if he's a Hutt, it doesn't seem very kind to agree to fetch something for him and then go: "Nyah nyah, I'm keeping that for my own people."

Still, it was amazing to me that they finally got around to fixing that bonus mission after who knows how many years and that as a result, I got to see something new in old content. I wonder if more such surprises await on the remaining planets that I haven't fully replayed since 4.0? If yes, will they be positive or negative?

Day 4: Missions & Conversations #IntPiPoMo

Wondering what the hashtag in the title is all about? Click here. Want to know all the themes that I have used and will be using for my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots? You can find the full list here.

My favourite thing about the story on Ziost is actually not the main events but the little sub-plot involving Agent Kovach. I had a whole little post written up about why that is, but for some reason it's been sitting in my draft folder for months... hmm... not sure why! I'll schedule it to go up after this one.

When the Imps take over Corellia, Darth Decimus holds a pretty impressive speech... well, actually I don't remember anything about the speech itself, but this visual from it was certainly nice enough for me to want to take a screenshot.

This screenshot is from an Imperial exploration mission on Alderaan called Bugs and Bombs which I find morbidly funny. Basically some Imps that carried valuable sensors have been killed and cocooned to the Kilik hives, so your mission is to bust them out to retrieve the sensors. However, from a mechanics point of view, the soldiers are still alive inside the cocoons, and when you pop them, the poor Imps fall to their deaths and give you XP as they die. It's so very wrong but I can't help but find it funny every time.

Speaking of funny, look at all these droids falling to their deaths on Makeb! Teehee.

What I imagine going through my Jedi knight's mind in this screenshot: "Nope, nope, nope, nope."

You might be wondering why I'm not featuring more shots from Knights of the Fallen Empire in this post, and in this series in general, considering how much I've praised its cinematic direction. And it does offer some great scenes for screenshots! The problem is that most of them are very obvious, so I've either used them before or they are just incredibly overused all over the web. This scene from Zakuul is a good example. Does it look cool? Hell yeah. Has every single person taken the exact same screenshot of their character standing with Lana and Senya? Probably. So there just isn't that much to show off here.

There is this neat little Imperial side mission on Quesh that has you observing a Republic walker blowing up through a set of binoculars. I really like this little cut scene. Shame I never feel half as cool when I use my own macrobinoculars.

I took so many screenshots of Kaon Under Siege for my Flashpoint Friday post about it, I didn't have room to use even half of them. It took me several runs to get this shot of Major Byzal getting jumped by a rakghoul and I'm quite proud of it... even if the rakghoul's pose mid-air is kind of comical.

IntPiPoMo count: 30

My Second Sorc - A 12x XP Story

This is Dormaba. She was one of my earliest alts, probably the fourth of fifth character I ever created. I had heard some good things about the Sith inquisitor story at the time and came up with a character concept for a light side Sith. Of course, when my character opened her mouth for the first time, I had to discover that it didn't matter what you said, the voice actor for the female inquisitor managed to make all of it sound incredibly snarky, which wasn't really what I'd had in mind. I knew that my character probably wasn't going to manage anything better than a neutral attitude before I'd even left Korriban. I quite enjoyed the Sith starter planet, but towards the end of Dromund Kaas my enthusiasm abruptly fizzled out. Look for artifacts for my master, without even knowing what and why? Meh. Eventually I managed to continue the story anyway, but it was in very rare and small bursts of gameplay. Nearly three years later, Dormaba was still only level 30 and had yet to set foot on Alderaan. I didn't help that I had rolled up another Sorcerer in the meantime and actually levelled that one to the cap.

Cue this whole 12x XP thing.

My initial impressions of it were humorous. Gaining nearly a full level just for handing in a single quest is pretty silly. I tried to mix things up a bit by doing some exploring in between class missions, but quickly found myself frustrated by how much travelling I had to do compared to engaging in actual gameplay. When you do all of the missions on a given planet you're generally forced to travel around in a small-ish area and get several quests done at once. When you're just following your class story on the other hand, you're constantly moving from map to map, to the point where you almost spend more time travelling than actually playing through the story.

I also noticed that my XP gains were wacky in more than one way. The floating text, the listed XP reward in the mission window and in the chat box almost never seemed to agree on a number, and sometimes it seemed to bug out completely, granting me little to no XP at all. Other people agreed with me on the forums that there seemed to be some sort of bug, while some claimed that it was just a graphical glitch. I think that if I was supposed to earn enough XP to earn a level and then I didn't actually level up, there's more than a UI malfunction going on - unless someone has actually been able to gain levels by resetting their UI or relogging.

Due to this I was falling somewhat behind as I was approaching level 40 and did the Quesh planetary storyline to bolster my experience gains a little. (Plus you can't go down on Quesh without picking up the starter mission to this chain, and I hate abandoning quests.) Around this level I also noticed that my gear was starting to seriously fall behind and that it had a very noticeable effect. I managed to catch up a little by spending some planetary commendations, but it was never quite enough. After a while I started to find gold mobs hard to kill, and later even silvers. I think the only thing that kept me afloat was my 700+ presence stat, which loses some of its potency by the higher levels but still provides a significant advantage compared to a character that doesn't have that additional companion power to fall back on.

The final boss fight of my class story was a real endurance test considering how underpowered my character was, which wasn't helped by the fact that Khem Val, my companion of choice, insisted on running into the circles of Bad that the boss kept placing on the floor throughout. In the end it was easier to just put Khem on passive every so often and kite the boss around the room on my own.

Money and crew skills were also an issue. I managed to stay on top of my artifice since I had materials stocked up on my other characters that I could fall back on, but I think that if I hadn't had that stockpile saved up, it would have been a pain to gather enough materials while levelling so quickly. It was also costly. While it helped that skill training was free, training crafting schematics was a considerable drain on my finances. I thought I was doing okay, hovering between 100k und 200k credits for the longest time - until I hit 400 artifice, went to train all the new schematics and suddenly found myself completely broke before I had even learned everything. I couldn't even afford to fly to the next planet to continue questing there. That was rather awkward.

Gameplay was engaging enough, as I specced my little Sorc into the lightning tree, dps being something that I had never seriously tried on either my Sage or my other Sorc. I used to joke that Sorcerers were boring, with all their abilities being lightning, lightning and yet more lightning, but there was actually something pretty satisfying about being able to get several quick zaps off in a row.

I also had time to really pay attention to the story and found myself wondering whether I was going to feel differently about it the second time around. (You may or may not recall that the inquisitor story wasn't one of my favourites.) The answer is pretty much no. If anything, the highs were a little less impressive the second time around since the surprise effect was gone, while all the times my character was cringing in pain and falling over were all the more noticeable. As I still don't have the guts to make a character go full-on dark side, my floundering around on neutral ground didn't seem to result in any noticeable differences in the story either - until the end, where my almost perfectly grey Sith was given a different honourary name by the Dark Council than my light side inquisitor, which I thought was neat.

Continuing to Makeb was pretty funny. If at all possible, the XP gains there seemed even more insane than the class story ones had been (even if they are supposed to be based on the same multiplier). The GSI support satellite system was a godsend and underlined just how undergeared my character was, considering that her health more than doubled every time I clicked on that shiny console. Suddenly things died at a speed and with an ease that was much closer to what I was used to, and it was nice. Relogging outside of a base and suddenly losing the buff in the middle of enemy territory was scary though.

I also enjoyed visiting Makeb again, somewhat to my own surprise. Immediately after 2.0 I kind of overdosed on it, with too many of characters having gone there in too short a period of time, but returning to it after a bit of a break, I enjoyed the story again, as well as just looking at the environment with its wacky beasts and strange flowers. (Balloon plants?) The moment I hit 55, my motivation to keep questing took its usual nosedive though.

Overall it was a pleasant enough experience and nice change of pace, though I do think there are definite disadvantages to levelling a character this way, aside from things like the financial issues I already mentioned. Spending all your time in class story phases feels lonely as you rarely encounter other players, and personally I felt that limiting myself to the class story resulted in me getting less of a "feel" for the character than usual. All those light and dark side decisions you get to make in the side stories really help with shaping a character's personality.

Random Revelations

My random PvE pursuits continue.

I actually got all the datacrons except the two Makeb ones on my main now. Yes, even the Green Matrix Shard on Belsavis. I got lucky in so far as it "only" took me about an hour to find the four Rakata Energy Cubes I needed. Pet Tank advised me that I should make the most of my work by parking some alts at the datacron location to see if I could quickly relog to get the Matrix Shard on all of them while the datacron was still active and without having to collect more cubes. Despite of Belsavis' long loading screen, I managed to click on it with a total of three characters, and I probably could have squeezed a fourth one in if I had been optimistic enough to bring a fourth one along in the first place.

Oddly enough, the endurance datacron on Quesh was probably the next hardest one. You used to be able to access it on your own (the SWTOR Spy guide hasn't been updated since those days), but I already knew that wasn't possible anymore. However, until fairly recently, Pet Tank and I were always able to get it with the two of us when we were levelling on Quesh, with one person clicking the outside panel and the other activating the two inside the cave in quick succession. Except the last time we got there, we found that the latter was suddenly impossible to do, even with a speed boost. I got lucky in that when I went to get it on Shin, there was already another guy there looking to group up for it, so I just had to coax Pet Tank into logging in to be our third.

All in all, it wasn't too bad an exercise as I had already made significant progress before this latest hunting session, but I don't think I could run another alt through all of it again right away. I look at the status of the datacron codex category on some of my alts, see things like "2 out of 69" and it just makes me want to weep.

On Imperial side, I've continued running flashpoints on my Operative and my Marauder. In this post-automated-group-finder world, most groups are fairly quiet, but I've noticed that everyone still says hello at the start and goodbye/thank you at the end. People also remain fairly easygoing for the most part. I was surprised to find that not all pugs hate listening to cut scenes or doing bonus bosses, even at endgame. One time I zoned into False Emperor HM and the tank dropped group the instant he saw which instance it was. We ended up three-manning it with Kaliyo tanking and never got a replacement tank despite of having requeued.

My favourite pug was probably the Core Meltdown hardmode run where upon zoning in I noticed that our tank had only about 23k health. I wondered whether I should say anything, but decided to see how things went first and leave it up to the healer to complain if he wanted to. Surprisingly, the healer managed to keep our paper tank upright throughout the whole thing, except on the sandstorm boss, where the other Marauder (who was way overgeared) simply dps-tanked the rest of the fight. It was just a little comical.

In other news, my guild has run EC NiM a lot in the past few weeks, to get tanks for people and to finish up achievements. I still don't have a tank, but at least EC is now the third operation for which I have 100% achievement completion. Every time we loot a chest with Molecular Stabilizers in there, someone makes a joke about how they are so excited about the loot, to mock its supposed worthlessness now compared to how much we all used to crave those "stabs" back before 2.0. Imagine my surprise then, when I checked the GTN to see whether anyone was still buying them, just to find that they were actually selling for more than Exotic Element Equalizers, the current blue crafting materials. I always knew that there was a segment of the population that lingered at 50 - basically anyone who hasn't bought Rise of the Hutt Cartel or subscribed for at least a month since they made it a free addition to the sub. But to see people actually care enough to craft old endgame level gear, to buy old crafting materials at higher prices than current crafting materials... that just boggles the mind.

Last night we undermanned an EV story mode on Imperial alts, and meant to take a guildie with us who was only level 48. He bounced off the door with an error message about needing to be level 50 to enter operations. We all scratched our heads in confusion, since we could distinctly remember taking sub-50 players into ops with us before. I asked on the forums and someone pointed out to me that this was a change made in patch 2.1 - over a year ago. I felt like such a noob... also a bit sad though. Did it really hurt anyone to be able to take along people who were a couple of levels lower?

Attis Station

The other day my tiny Shadow tank made it to Quesh. The class quest there leads you to a place called Attis Station, and without giving away any story spoilers, I think it's safe to say that you've got to fight some bad guys in it. The thing that makes this particular mission stand out from many others is that the bad guys are quite a bit tougher than in most class story installments. In fact, the phase is closer in difficulty to a [Heroic 2] mission than to most solo ones, featuring pulls of one weak mob and two strong ones, a strong mob plus elite combo, and one group of no less than three strong opponents. For some classes, a setup like this would be outright impossible to solo.

Not so for the Jedi consular: regardless of whether you chose to be a Shadow or a Sage, you'll have a tank, a dps and a healing companion by this point, so whatever setup you picked for your character, you'll have a companion to complement it. You'll also have access to a sixty-second crowd control, an interrupt, and at least one stun, not to mention extra abilities only available to your chosen advanced class. Basically, as a consular of that level, you have all the abilities needed to solo something of [Heroic 2] difficulty if you know what you're doing... but do you?

On the consular class forum you can find quite a few threads about Attis Station, full of people expressing confusion about how to overcome this challenge. One thread I found had no less than 22 pages. Most of them don't so much complain that it's too hard... they just aren't sure what they are doing wrong.

As an experienced player (and somewhat over-levelled for the planet on top of it), I had no problems with the mission of course, but I remember finding it at least somewhat challenging the first time I did it, on my Sage.

Taking the strongest mob out of the equation by using crowd control goes without saying.

There are other class missions that have inspired similar threads. At the time I'm writing this, there's a ten-page thread on the first page of the consular class forum that asks how to defeat the final boss of chapter one. This is one I don't recall ever having any difficulties with, but apparently he does a big cast that will one-shot the player if not interrupted. As an MMO vet, interrupting anything that looks nasty comes to me pretty much automatically, so I never even found out about it being a one-shot. But to a genuinely new player who might not even be used to paying attention to cast bars, even something as "simple" as having to interrupt a single ability can seem baffling.

I think it's really nice that SWTOR has these slightly more challenging class quests sprinkled in among the easier ones every now and then. I don't think that any of them should be prohibitively difficult (after all the focus during the class story is on the story, not so much the gameplay), but keeping in mind that this is an MMO, I think it's beneficial to train players in the very basics of how to play their class as they level up. The class story is the ideal vehicle for this as well because it's the one piece of content that almost everyone will do as they level up, and it can be tailored specifically towards the abilities of the class. A setup like Attis Station would be cruel and (at level) pretty much impossible for a class with no crowd control for example - but since it's a story exclusive to consulars, the devs know that you'll have some CC available and can require its use.

Features like WoW's recent insta-max level if you preorder their next expansion have once again ignited the discussion about the value of an MMO's levelling game vs. what you do at the level cap, and one argument that I often hear is that levelling doesn't teach you anything relevant to the elder game anyway. I don't agree with that, though I'll concede that levelling in WoW certainly teaches you a lot less these days than it used to. The thing that people tend to forget is that it doesn't have to be that way - and it's certainly increased my appreciation for the fact that SWTOR, while far from being a difficult game while levelling up, at least "dares" to challenge you enough to encourage you to get comfortable with all your class's key abilities.

Day 10: Death

This is the tenth and last post in my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots challenge. Click on any screenshot to see a larger version.

Let's start with a death that was not my own, but served as a lesson to me. Noob me was innocently cruising across the dunes of Tatooine at the time, when I suddenly spotted a lone Jedi going up against a world boss... and going splat very quickly. I can only guess that, like so many others, he fell victim to the lure of "clicking on the glowing skull to see what happens". I knew not to follow his example afterwards.

My own first death to a TOR raid boss was to the Rogue Cartel Warbot on Quesh. I'm not even sure how it happened, as he doesn't have any particularly tricky abilities or anything... I guess I was just dumb. I felt suitably humiliated as the fight moved away from me and all over the courtyard while I just continued to lie in a corner feeling stupid. Nobody else died on that fight either.

Oh Soa and your many fall deaths! Though I have to say, considering the harshness of the platform dropping mechanic when you're first learning it, I'm surprised that I haven't seen a lot more people die to it.

There was also this one time when we had just wiped and I was the last one to make it back... and then I took one step down from the ledge at the entrance and managed to fall through the tiny gap between the ledge and the top platform, instantly plummeting to my death again. Everyone was like "Where is Shintar?" and "What happened? Why is she dead again?" while I was laughing tears in front of my computer screen and nearly pissing myself. Just my luck to find a gap that most people hadn't even taken notice of. I did feel a bit bad for making everyone wait while I had to run back in a second time, but the fact that some guildies started referring to anyone falling to their death in stupid places as "doing a Shintar" afterwards absolutely made it worth it.

The boss kills where everyone except one person is dead at the end are always the best ones, aren't they? This was on hard mode.

Finally, this shot shows a run of Kaon Under Siege where we were in the cinema when our Commando suddenly keeled over dead. What happened? "I just stood on this chair and then I was suddenly dead! I didn't do anything else, I swear!" "Which chair?" asked our tank, clearly disbelieving. He jumped around on a couple of them... and suddenly fell over dead as well. The rest of us knew not to mess with the furniture after that! During a different run we also had someone die to a table in a different room. I probably shouldn't enjoy random bugs like that this much, but deadly furniture is just too silly...

Anyway, that's it for this series. I hope people got some enjoyment out of this little glimpse into my everyday play.

Day 6: Environments

This is the sixth post in my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots challenge. Click on any screenshot to see a larger version.

I bet you thought that I had given up on this! I haven't, but all the hullabaloo about server transfers was too distracing for me to write about anything else really. However, now that things are slowly getting back to normal, let's talk environments.

One criticism of the game that I've seen a few times is that it supposedly doesn't have good graphics. Personally I don't see that at all, but then I also feel that I haven't actually encountered a game with genuinely bad graphics in many years. That's not to say that I like all modern video game graphics to an equal extent, but my like or dislike isn't so much based on their supposed quality as it is about overall style and maybe nitpicking on details such as that I don't like the look of certain animations in some games (also refer to this Extra Credits episode).

The Old Republic has won me over in every respect here, as I love the slightly cartoony style (I really don't care for attempts at photorealism in games), I adore most of the animations (seriously, I could just watch Jedi knights jump around all day and I'd be happy), and overall the art direction very much follows the aesthetics of the films by focusing on interesting character designs placed in front of gorgeous backdrops.

My favourite operation from a visual point of view is still Eternity Vault. Nothing says "Star Wars" like huge, gaping chasms without safety rails! Also, the place just generally feels enormous, even though the area you actually play in is of limited size.

For a bit of contrast, within the same operation we have this scene, taken during a raid break. Here the little details actually work quite well - I loved the look of those glowy mushrooms. Too bad I rarely get to pay attention to them while we plough through trash mobs.

One thing I still don't do nearly often enough is look up. I thought that Quesh had pretty much no redeeming features until I went there with my agent and my companion Vector prompted me to look up with a comment about the redness of the sky. Dude! I can't believe I never noticed! I now try to pay more attention to my companions' prompts, as they encourage me to stop for a little while to appreciate the scenery (even if I'm itching to get to the next part of my class quest).

Mako has been very good at this on Dromund Kaas in particular. Until she made me look up while playing my bounty hunter, I never even really noticed the way the citadel in Kaas City looms above the rest of the city.

And for a nice view of space, here's my boyfriend's Sith inquisitor boosting me through the Foundry. (We did eventually make it past HK-47 once he hit max level.) When we stepped out of the actual installation and found ourselves with naught but a force field above our heads, I was quite awed. Very atmospheric.